The Race to Find Myself

What do you do when you're 28 years old and you're certain you're adopted, but your family continues to insist you aren't? Amanda Campbell struck out on her own to find out who she really was, and what she discovered was nothing short of shocking

The clues to the great secret were always there, but growing up in a neat-as-a-pin beige ranch house in northeast Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s, Amanda Campbell could never connect them. It was like trying to see the outline of a forest made of mirror trees. Supposedly she had two baby books; someone had half-joked about it long ago—back when everyone was still talking—but she could only ever open the pink ribbony one filled out in her mother's flawless script, the one that told how much she weighed, ate, and slept in her first year of life, that described the gymnastics and dance classes she took, the words she babbled before she was five.

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The mystery deepened with the color of her skin. She began life relatively pale, but by the time she was 9 or 10, she was much darker than her mother and father and baby sister, and her hair was kinkier. In high school the kids would mutter, "She's the black girl who thinks she's white"—but what else was she supposed to think? She'd been told she was white for as long as she could remember. She'd first started asking when she was 12, and, well, hadn't her dad gotten ruddier as he got older, as years of boozing stacked up behind him? Maybe, just maybe, there was a recessive African gene in him, Amanda thought, a gene he despised enough to call her the N-word sometimes when he was drunk.

Amanda's suspicion that she wasn't her parents' biological child was always there, like a faint bell clanging louder every year, but she didn't really push her mother on the matter until she herself was a mother, with one young son and twins on the way. Then, Amanda learned the story that belongs in her second baby book. She also learned that while society endlessly debates which matters more—nature or nurture—sometimes both are wholly inadequate to explain why the girl becomes the woman she is. No matter how much we know about our origins, the closer we look, the more we realize that who we are, even why we exist, may remain a mystery.

Amanda is a caramel-colored, clear-eyed mother of three with a wide smile and blond-streaked curly brown hair. Her voice has an appealing combination of gentleness and confidence, and she rarely raises it, no matter what her three young sons are getting into. Thirty years old, she has her mom's perfectionist bent, her penchant for maintaining order inside and out. Messy feelings go in a notebook she carries everywhere with her. She apologizes for the state of her spotless house. Her husband, Jason Campbell, recently quit his job as a car salesman, but Amanda keeps the paychecks coming in and her own spirits up. There's a sign on her bedroom door: Everyday Goals. The list is drill-sergeant simple: "Walk. Drink 64 ounces of water. Read the Bible for five minutes. Organize for 10 minutes." In other words, she has the can-do, will-do armor of a survivor—but she is more than that. She has a liveliness, an intelligence, an unfussy kindness about her that will leave me marveling, the more I learn of her story. The apple was thrown, hurled, whipped from the tree.

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"After I was 18, I just always figured I was adopted," Amanda tells me as we sit in her station wagon in front of the ranch house where she grew up. She now lives five hours south of here, in Rogue River, where she works as part jailer/part counselor for boys in a state juvenile detention center. Her children, the twins and their older brother, are sleeping in their car seats, sweaty, coated with milk shake. "When I envisioned my real parents, I envisioned a white girl who had a thing with a black boy and her family wouldn't accept it."

Her baby book describes a circle of warmth. On the page for "first birthday party," her mother wrote: "A big party. 25 people. Mandy had a Holly Hobbie cake made for her. Mom made it." Each present is listed. Twenty-four people came to the second birthday, where they ate a cat-and-mouse cake. Her mom, Amanda says, aimed for a household of scrupulous middle-class normality. "She really cared about how things looked. At Christmas, we would have to pose for a picture after we opened each present."

Young Amanda did her part to buff the family's surfaces. She got good grades, played sports and the flute. Even the asthma from which she has suffered since ­infancy had an upside: She was selected as the National Asthma and Allergy Poster Child in 1992, and she and her mother traveled to Washington, DC, where she got her photo taken with the first President Bush.

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The picture lost some of its shine as Amanda got older. The family gradually ceased contact with relatives on her mother's side, such that Amanda's maternal grandmother just dropped off Christmas presents at the door and hustled away, never staying for dinner. As for Amanda, she kept her "good girl" cred—solid report cards, no drinking or drugs—but in her mid-teens, she says, she became depressed. There were teenage hormones to contend with, her father's drinking had accelerated, and her parents had ugly fights. And then there was her skin, her inexplicable dark skin. "Once I started middle school, almost daily the question would come up, `What are you?' " Amanda recalls. "In the beginning, I didn't even understand the question. After I figured it out, I'd say, `I'm white, I guess,' or, `My parents are white, so I guess that makes me white' "—answers that, as one can imagine, made her the subject of much jeering among her classmates.

Hands: Gary Houlder/Corbis; Campbell: courtesy of Amanda Campbell

"My mother didn't want to hear about it," Amanda says. "I would write little notes telling her I thought I needed therapy. She would put them back on my bed, folded up, and never say anything." At 15, after a family argument, Amanda was sent to her room, where she swallowed 80 Tylenols but quickly told her parents, who took her to get her stomach pumped. A social worker interviewed her in her hospital bed about the family discord but never followed up. "That was the low point in my life. After that, I promised myself I would never let myself get that down. And I haven't."

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Following graduation from high school, she gathered up enough scholarship and loan money to go to Southern Oregon University, where in 2003 she became the first person in her family to earn a four-year college degree, a bachelor's in human communications with a minor in criminology. She married Jason, whom she met in a bar, a year later.

A combination of factors drove Amanda to find out once and for all where she came from: her pregnancy and the news that her father had been admitted to a nursing home suffering from brain degeneration with a possible genetic component. (By that point, her parents had divorced, and her mother had remarried.) Afraid she might pass something dangerous to her unborn babies, she ordered her birth certificate from the state. Eight weeks later, the envelope arrived. "I was on the phone; Jason walked in with it and said, `You need to see this.' " And there, on the line for "Mother," was the name of a woman she'd never heard of: Katherine Stockton.* The line for "Father" was blank.

Amanda called her mother, reaching her in the stands at a hockey game in Portland, sitting with her stepchildren. On the cell phone, her mother blurted out the story. "She said, `We never wanted you to know,' " according to Amanda. "Kathy Stockton was my sister," Amanda's mother continued. "She was profoundly retarded because your grandmother had German measles and refused to have an abortion. Kathy Stockton was raped, and you are her child." She added that she didn't know if the rapist was ever caught, but that she'd heard he was "probably Hispanic." And, she said, Amanda's real mother was dead.

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"In that moment, my whole life changed," Amanda wrote later. "But really nothing changed, the muffling was gone, and I was now standing in the bell tower as the bell rang incessantly; the vibrations made it hard...to pay attention to anything other than the loud sound of the bell."

Reeling, Amanda confided in her closest friend. "I wasn't sure whether to believe my mother or not. I was six months pregnant. That night, I woke up hyperventilating, having a panic attack." She decided she needed to know more, not less. She drove to the state records office in Portland and found that there was no death certificate for a Katherine Stockton. She went to the pediatrician who'd cared for her as a child in Portland. He wasn't in, but another doctor in the practice confirmed the story. It seemed everyone had known about it but her.

Around this time, CNN aired a documentary, Where's Molly?, about a man named Jeff Daly who'd tracked down his long-lost sister, a former resident of Fairview Training Center, a home for the mentally disabled. One of Amanda's coworkers saw it, and Amanda called Cindy Daly, Jeff's wife, who'd produced the program and had vast contacts in the Oregon human services system. Within two days, Cindy told Amanda that her mother was living in a group home in Portland, not two miles from where Amanda had gone to high school.

In 1956, Linda Beard, 17 years old and pregnant, boarded a train from Portland, Oregon, headed for her boyfriend at an Air Force base in Georgia. She was a lean looker with fine Nordic features and had never been east of the Oregon state line. Her mother packed her some sandwiches and told her not to talk to strangers, and for the next three days, Linda made the sandwiches last, kept her mouth shut, and watched the continent go by.

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At the base in Georgia, her high school beau, Dale Stockton,* was training to fly military jets. After she gave birth to their little girl, Linda went to work as a nursing aide in the county hospital. Two years later, she became pregnant with their second child, just, it so happened, as she contracted German measles. The doctors told her there was a chance that her baby wouldn't be born "right." "They said I could have an abortion or take my chances, because I was less than 24 hours pregnant when I got sick," Linda recalls. "They'd traced it down that far. And I said, `For 24 hours, I'll take my chances.' "

Hands: Gary Houlder/Corbis; Campbell: courtesy of Amanda Campbell

Linda moved back to Portland to give birth to another girl, whom she named Katherine. Within six weeks, Linda realized her daughter was indeed not right. Her pale eyes were sightless, she wasn't growing, and she barely moved. Dale came home from service in Greenland in time for the first of seven operations on Kathy's eyes and three on her heart. She survived, but Linda was told her girl would never function beyond an infant level.

Her marriage soon collapsed. "He was a nice man," Linda says of her ex, 50 years on, reminiscing from inside her cat-filled, two-room, railroad-style house in a ramshackle neighborhood near the airport in Portland. Down the weedy highway a few blocks from her home, there's a billboard from the Clackamas Sheriff: "1 in 4 Girls is abused before she is 18. It's OK to Tell." To the east, the snowcapped peak of Mount Hood pokes through the clouds like a mirage. "But when Kathy turned out the way she turned out, he couldn't handle it."

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Linda really couldn't handle it either. After she and Dale split, she took a job slinging burgers at a diner while her mother raised her older daughter. As for her sick child, Kathy, Linda took doctors' advice to relinquish her parental rights to the state, as was still common practice for the severely mentally disabled in the 1960s. The little girl was sent to live at the Fairview Training Center, a massive 1,400-bed institution made up of clusters of buildings set on 700 rolling green acres. The facility was located an hour south of Portland, in the state capitol of Salem, and Linda says she tried to visit once a month, but she found the place, and her daughter's inability to recognize her, deeply depressing.

Meanwhile, Dale remarried a woman with kids of her own and drifted out of their lives. When Kathy was about 12, he drove to Fairview one morning and spent the whole day with her, as she lay on a bed in a fetal position. The next day, he committed suicide. Dale apparently had many problems, but this was how he chose to spend his last day: saying goodbye to a daughter he'd essentially erased from his life.

In the summer of 1979, Kathy had just turned 19. She had her mother's thick, pale hair and facial structure and a voluptuous upper body. The hospital superintendent recalls her as rather attractive, though she was only four feet tall, weighed less than 70 pounds, wore diapers, and was fed mashed food with a spoon. She couldn't speak and expressed her dislikes by scratching.

For other people her age, it was a summer of disco, hot pants, "My Sharona," and Jimmy Carter's last stand. For Kathy, it was the season that Emanuel "Manny" Sistrunk, a 31-year-old high school dropout, showed up in her life. Chicago born and bred, Sistrunk was not an exemplary citizen. He'd gotten a girl he met in Boston pregnant, and he was later incarcerated for a year in Oregon for raping a homeless 16-year-old. Another time, he distinguished himself with the law by stepping out in front of then Vice President Walter Mondale's motorcade to protest his joblessness. Sistrunk landed a job at Fairview in 1979 under a federal recession-busting program known as CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act). His new employer didn't have a much better reputation than he did. Established by the Oregon State Legislature in 1908 to house the "feebleminded," by the 1960s, when Kathy was admitted, Fairview had reached its highest population level, with close to 3,000 inhabitants. Conditions in the so-called cottages—which once had been said to resemble "magnificent southern mansions"—were notoriously bad. Disabled children were lined up in cots and received the sketchiest of education and training; assaults among the residents were common. Sistrunk was put to work in the cottage for severely disabled women.

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In October, Linda got a call at the diner: "You're going to have a baby," a hospital supervisor told her. Kathy was pregnant. "The first thing I thought was, I need a cigarette," Linda says. "The second was, I'm going to kill someone." She drove to Salem immediately.

Hospital superintendent Jerry McGee explained that Kathy had been on a special feeding program, and when she'd started gaining weight, doctors credited the extra nutrition. Now tests showed Kathy was five months pregnant. Too late for an abortion, Linda thought. Kathy wasn't the only one: Another woman in the same cottage, diagnosed with profound autism, was also five months along.

Linda agreed to take Kathy's baby, though it was touch-and-go whether 67-pound Kathy would even survive the pregnancy. On January 25, 1980, University Hospital North doctors in Portland delivered a two-pound infant via ­C-section. No one knows what Kathy comprehended. "I stood outside the door while they did it and listened," Linda says. "She laughed through the whole thing."

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Hands: Gary Houlder/Corbis; Campbell: courtesy of Amanda Campbell

Linda named the girl Amanda. Nurses gave Kathy a doll to see how she might respond to a baby, but she only held it for a minute before hurling it across the room.

Kathy returned to Fairview after the C-section in decent health, but Amanda, born a month premature, remained in the hospital in critical condition. Linda and her eldest daughter stood vigil, social workers hustling them in and out of the hospital's back entrances to shield them from local newspaper reporters who'd found out about the pregnancies at Fairview.

After a month, Amanda was discharged home, though she wasn't exactly welcome. "When my dad found out the guy that raped Kathy was black, all hell broke loose," Linda says. Her father owned the house where she was living and threatened to throw her out. "My dad was the type who believed white marries white, black marries black, and there's no in between." At that point, Linda's eldest daughter, Kathy's then 21-year-old sister, volunteered to formally adopt her niece.

Meanwhile, Portland prosecutors charged Sistrunk with rape. DNA testing did not yet exist, but the state-of-the-art blood testing at the time had found with 97 percent certainty that he was the father of Amanda and the autistic woman's baby boy. Investigators also had statements from at least four fellow Fairview aides saying that they'd reported Sistrunk to supervisors (for, among other things, kissing one patient on the mouth and improperly touching another's vagina). Sexual assault law at the time was tilted in favor of defendants, and the prosecutors were worried they'd lose at trial—Kathy and the other Fairview resident were lousy witnesses, and their cases couldn't be tried together to establish a pattern, as would be routine now. So Sistrunk was allowed to plead to a lesser charge. He was sentenced to 10 years for his crime—five for each woman.

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For reasons that Oregon Department of Corrections officials say cannot be determined, Sistrunk was paroled in June 1984, having served only two years of his 10-year sentence. A few months later, he raped an 11-year-old girl and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. By the time he was tried for that crime in 1986, the pendulum in rape cases had swung decisively in favor of victims; children were considered reliable witnesses, for one thing. Sistrunk was found guilty and sentenced to a maximum of 30 years. Proving that the pendulum probably will swing in perpetuity, a three-judge appeals panel in 2001 threw out a statement an expert made in the girl's trial that children never lie about sexual abuse. But the panel upheld Sistrunk's conviction anyway; he's due for parole in 2015.

In February 2008, an eight-months-pregnant Amanda walked up the stone steps of a clean, gabled house nestled behind a wall of ivy in northeast Portland. She had Cindy Daly with her for support. Inside, she found a group home with rubber floors and caretakers who tend to inhabitants who can barely walk, swallow, or talk. Each resident has an aide who serves as a "voice." Kathy's "voice" is a lean young man with magenta-dyed hair and several piercings. He is trying to teach her to sign for "no" instead of scratching.

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Kathy, who was moved here when Fairview closed in 2000, was curled up in an adult-size jogger stroller, her hands over her face. Amanda had made her a tiny cloth book about herself, with bits of feather and fluff taped in for tactile sensation—the kind of gift you'd give to a baby. She sat down on the couch and started stroking her mother's arm, telling her who she was. After a few minutes, Kathy crawled out of her jogger and into pregnant Amanda's lap.

The staff and Cindy Daly started to weep. "Here was this woman, who has almost no family contact for her whole life," Daly says. "And she doesn't know her own daughter, but we all saw it, there was this eerie connection she made with Amanda. Everyone in the room felt it."

For Amanda, meeting the frail, wordless woman whose body had formed her was surreal. "I am such the mother. I fell in love with my babies in my womb. How do you hold something in your womb and not know you gave it life? I picture her feeling so alone and being ignored when she was pregnant and when I was born. What did she think of the life moving inside? I cannot believe she felt nothing."

Two weeks after meeting her birth mother, Amanda gave birth to fraternal twin boys she named Isaiah and Samson. Isaiah is heavier and quieter and darker. Samson is petite and blond and strongly resembles his grandmother. He's also a handful—Amanda puts him in squeaky shoes to keep track of him.

Hands: Gary Houlder/Corbis; Campbell: courtesy of Amanda Campbell

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When the twins were two months old, Amanda learned Emanuel Sistrunk's name, again thanks to Cindy Daly. Yellowed newspaper clippings told the story of her conception: "Two Fairview Residents Apparent Rape Victims." Amanda went to the state Department of Corrections website, where she studied a mug shot of Sistrunk, bearded and older. There was her skin color and her hair, maybe even her eyes. For a while, she considered writing him, pretending to be a criminology student interested in his case. She imagined the clinical fashion in which she'd approach him. "From what I know about sex offenders, most likely he'd try to groom me," she says, using the jargon for how sex offenders soften up potential victims. "There was a part of me thinking, What if he starts sending me sick sexual things?"

Then she phoned a juror from Sistrunk's 1986 rape case who'd publicly criticized the attempt to appeal his conviction for raping the 11-year-old. The juror told Amanda he thought her father had no redeeming qualities, that he "was and always will be an evil man." She decided not to contact Sistrunk, though she plans to attend his parole hearing to speak out for her mother. She doesn't buy that her mother was a consensual partner, as a social worker testified in a pretrial hearing. "I have a hard time believing she didn't feel pain," Amanda says. "Who stood by and did nothing? Someone had to have known something wasn't right."

We've been talking for more than an hour in the front seat of Amanda's car when the sleeping boys stir in the backseat. They go everywhere with her—even though her husband is out of work, the kids are mainly her responsibility. She unstraps her sons, changes their diapers, sets them loose in the playground where she herself once played, an enchanted forest of towering Northwest Pines and swings and teeter-totters. As we watch the twins run, we can see flickers of Linda's strong, angular features, and the more delicate visage of the mute, bent woman who is Amanda's real mother, and then Amanda's own broader, darker face, all flashing by as the twilight deepens.

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Amanda and her adoptive mother are completely estranged over Amanda's determination to trace her real roots; her adoptive mom, who asked not to be named in the story and for the most part refused to comment for the record, says she didn't tell her daughter the "terrible story" of her origins because the officials who handled the adoption advised her not to. ­Amanda, however, says she's still disturbed that she was kept in the dark about her "disabled relative," not the first time she's employed the curiously general term "relative" when talking about her biological parents. "It's worse than thinking someone is dead. It's like they were never born, zero acknowledgement." She'll tell her sons about their family history, Amanda says, doling out the information as they're able to understand it. "They will know Kathy is their grandmother."

Amanda recently learned that Sistrunk has children from several relationships, and she has contacted a half-sister, who's in her mid-thirties. After being the "black girl who thinks she's white," Amanda is anxious to build a mixed-race family network for herself. "Emanuel is evil," she says, "but I don't believe evil is genetic."

In December, it will be two years since ­Amanda first saw the name "Katherine Stockton" on her birth certificate. She now gets updates on her mother's care and condition. She learned Kathy likes to swing, likes to be massaged, and has an unbreakable habit of licking metal. Amanda, mother of toddlers, found the last trait ironic. "My babies like to lick metal too. When I first heard that, I thought, Maybe they can share some spoons."

She is still struggling to make sense of the truth. "A child is always a blessing, but was this child?" she wrote in her journal, referring to herself, shortly after she learned about Kathy. "[My mother] should not have been born. To be born as a shell of a person, only to be raped at 19 and have whatever humanity or dignity she'd had stripped away. Who could look upon this baby, this representation of how one man preyed upon a disabled young woman, and see a blessing?"

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When she looks in the mirror, she sees the victim and the rapist, intertwined, from a moment 30 years ago. But she is also beginning to see herself, Amanda Campbell. "I've come to believe that it doesn't matter who your parents are—what matters is who you are," she says. Amanda is too humble to say it, but part of who she is is someone brave enough to embrace Kathy Stockton: the first member of her family to regularly visit her, to speak kindly to her, to touch her, to rock her in her lap. The first not to try to erase her. "I believe everyone has a purpose," says Amanda, who while in high school worked in a group home, caring for the paralyzed residents. "And I have a strong sense Kathy needs to be protected." ­Amanda is grateful to her biological mother for helping her to discover her capacity for compassion, she says, though she can't help but feel overwhelmed—at times, plain dumbfounded—by the series of tragedies that led to her existence, not to mention the Gothic strangeness of it all. "I still have the feeling someone is going to call me and say, `Okay, this is all a joke. Here are your real parents.' "

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